Pop17 was created by Sarah Austin, a powerful female media brand with strong ties to technology, entertainment and the chic geek world. Sarah Austin, the host and director, is an Internet personality, life-caster, vlogger, angel investor and web video pioneer. She is also the creator and executive producer of the popular branded entertainment viral video series Pop17. With over 25 million video views to her vlogs, she distributes her work in partnership with MTV Networks. She was named America's Tweetheart by Vanity Fair Magazine for her influential twitter followers and was later endorsed by Lady Gaga. She has worked with brands from Ford, Intel, Nikon, Microsoft Bing, and Virgin America and has been featured in numerous magazines and publications from Fast Company to Portfolio and The New York Times and made guest appearances on shows ranging from The X Factor to Attack of the Show. Sarah Austin is often referred to as the most popular life-caster online.

Google Ventures Leads $5M Series A: Pocket Change

Pocket Change, a startup that aims to be the first virtual mobile game economy, raised $5 million in Series A funding. The company plans to be the first universal virtual currency for android game developers to seamlessly integrate in less than 2 hours. “Whether they are buying the game to play it or buying something in the game, there’s a tremendous amount of purchasing power,” says their CEO, Ari Mir.

Led by Google Ventures, this series A includes existing investors from First Round Capital, David Sacks, Kamran Pourzanjani, Scott Banister, and Baroda Ventures. Google Ventures partner, Joe Kraus, will be joining the Pocket Change board of directors alongside Myspace CEO, Mike Jones.

The company has raised a total of $6.4 million to date. I sat down with the CEO, Ari Mir, for an interview on Pop17. Ari is the co-founder of in-image ad network GumGum and former CTO of Geni and SVP of Engineering at Yammer.

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